artist bios

Thembi Soddell

Thembi Soddell’s volatile sonic worlds morph, shift, rupture and dis-rupture into filmic atmospheres with a distinctly disquieting edge. Contorted into unreal environments and luscious masses of sonic textures, her sound palate sources field recordings, instruments and electronics to be suggestive but often unidentifiable. Her compositions exploit the dynamic extremes, toying with the listeners’ sense of expectation and generating anticipatory suspense. Based in Melbourne, Australia, she does work for CD, gallery installation, and live performance. She has been involved in many of Australia's major sound festivals, such as What is Music?, Liquid Architecture and The Now Now Festival of Spontaneous Music, and toured Europe as part of a collaborative duo with cellist, Anthea Caddy. She is a graduate with honours in sound art from RMIT, and assists in running the Australian experimental music label, cajid media.http://thembisoddell.com

Bruce Mowson

Bruce Mowson is a Melbourne based sound and video artist who has completed a Ph.D in Fine Art, entitled "Sound and Video Installation Art: Existence as a state of immanence" . He works as a freelance sessional lecturer and writer, in addition to various art projects. His work combines a wide-ranging and highly practical background in sound technology with critical thinking from fine art, media art and philosophical areas. In 2009 he was awarded theBarcelona Studio Residency by the Austalia Council for the Arts. http://www.brucemowson.com

Lawrence English

Lawrence English (Bris) is a writer, composer and media artist. Working across a broad range of art forms, English's work is eclectic and characterises a long-term exploration of various themes, including audio/visual environments. London's Time Out referred to his output as 'ambient twisted soundscapes and challenging sonic scree', andU.S. sound journal, Signal To Noise described English's work as 'extraordinarily gorgeous modern music concréte'. He is also involved in staging sound events such as fabrique, syncretism, liquid architecture and what is music? and features in 'the anti-charts" segment on Triple J.

contact: lawrence [at] room40.org

Camilla Hannan

Camilla Hannan is a Melbourne based sound artist who works exclusively with field recordings. She processes these recordings into abstract representations of place and experience. Camilla has performed in Australia and internationally. She has performed at festivals including Articulating the Medium (San Francisco), The Now Now (Sydney), Liquid Architecture (Melbourne/Brisbane) and Totally Huge Music Festival (Perth). Her sound installation work has been featured at the Sydney Opera House, San Francisco MOMA, Gertrude Contemporary Art Space, Melbourne and the AC Institute, New York. www.camillahannan.com

Phillip Pietruschka

A composer from Melbourne, Australia. He studied electro-acoustic composition at RMIT, attaining Honours in 2003. Pietruschka's music takes cues from elements of electro-acoustic and avant-garde classical music. Composing with studio production techniques inspired by Pierre Henry, Luigi Nono and Ennio Morricone, he regularly works with some of Melbourne's finest improvising musicians to weave unique sonic tapestries. Pietruschka's music has frequently appeared as soundtracks to video and installation work by artists including Cassandra Tytler, Geoff Robinson, and Shaun Yue. Selected electro-acoustic presentations include Liquid Architecture Festival of Sound Arts, DeScore 04 at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Gertrude St Contemporary Art Spaces, Sydney Opera House Art Gallery on behalf of DLux Media Arts and Variable Resistance at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Pietruschka recently completed a tour of Canada as part of a collaborative sound art project called Telephone. He is presently touring Australia with the Back to Back Theatre company as the Audio Operator.

contact: phillip_pietruschka [at] yahoo.com.au

Anthea Caddy

Anthea Caddy and her cello divide their time between Melbourne, Australia and Berlin, Germany. The primary focus of her sonic investigations have been combining her knowledge base in sound with her instrumental performance. Exploiting the cello’s textural, spatial and dynamic capabilities, she draws reference points from electro-acoustic music and instrumental performance. Interested in the relationship between digital composition, environmental field recording, and acoustic performance she seeks to consolidate both the conceptual and practical aspects of these media, articulating techniques and concepts indigenous to digital spatialisation in her performances and recordings. Anthea's regular collaborations at present are in duo with Thembi Soddell (Iland, Cajidmedia), Magda Mayas (inside piano) with Philip Samartzis (as part of the ensemble Absence and Presence released on ‘Unheard Spaces’), in trio with Robin Hayward and Eric La Casa, a performance/installation project ..Maps of Corners..in duo with Annette Krebs and has played with many artists including Tarab (Eamon Sprod), Clayton Thomas, Christian Wolff, Alice Hui Sheng Chang, Larry Polansky, Tony Conrad, Chris Abrahams, Tim Catlin, Robin Fox, Anthony Pateras, Domenico Sciajno......

Natasha Anderson

Natasha Anderson is a Melbourne musician who combines contrabass and garklein recorders with electronics to create works which constantly shift between dialectic extremes; those of frequency, the digital and the bodily and the processed and the instrumental. Deconstructed woodwind articulations merge with gestures that move quickly from real-time processing to the acoustic, dynamically extending the instrumental language and generating multiple and conflicting points of focus. Ultimately the source of these sounds, images and gestures, whether electronic, instrumental or bodily, become tangled and confused.

James Rushford

James Rushford is a young Melbourne-based composer/performer, interested in a diverse range of contemporary music. Alongside concert music, a focus lies in inter-media, installation and recorded mediums. Earlier this year, James was the recipient of the E&M Cooper Travel Scholarship and the Dowd Foundation Award, enabling him to tour overseas and work with musicians including Robert Ashley, Phill Niblock, Marcus Schmickler, Fred Frith and Michael Pisaro. As a composer, James was also the recipient of the 2008 Marion and Isobel Thomas Prize, the 2004 Frank Bosch Scholarship, and has had music commissioned by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, The Song Company, Speak! Percussion, Team of Pianists, CUSP Gallery/Chunky Move Dance Company, The Australian National Academy of Music, the Melbourne International Arts Festival (2006), and the 21:100:100 project (a collaboration with Oren Ambarchi and Marco Fusinato). A multi-instrumentalist, James performs mostly with piano, viola and electronics,.